61. The Committee has for some time been conducting
a major, ongoing inquiry into Foreign Policy Aspects of the War
against Terrorism, in which it has included discussion of the
legal and moral case for military action against the Iraqi regime.[93]
A further Report of that inquiry will be published shortly. This
separate inquiry into The Decision to go to War in Iraq was prompted
by specific concerns that Parliament had been misled by the Government
when being asked to approve military action against the Iraqi
regime in March 2003. Allegations to that effect received wide
coverage in the print and broadcast media in early June 2003,
including a claim by BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan that a source
within the intelligence community had told him that the September
dossier had been changed in the week before publication, by the
insertion of the suggestion that Iraqi forces were able to deploy
chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of receiving
an order to do so. We consider this and Mr Gilligan's other allegations
below.[94]
In this section, we focus on the credibility of the 45 minutes
claim, as it was made in the dossier.

62. The FCO told us that the intelligence on which
the claim was based came from "an established, reliable and
longstanding line of reporting."[95]
The raw intelligence was received by the Secret Intelligence Service
in August 2002, and was assessed by the JIC in early September.[96]
It was included in the first draft of the dossier after responsibility
for preparing that document had passed from the FCO to the JIC
Chairman, dated 10 September.[97]

63. It is known that the claim rested on a single
source.[98]
It appears that no evidence was found which corroborated the information
supplied by the source, although it was consistent with a pattern
of evidence of Iraq's military capability over time.[99]
Neither are we aware that there was any corroborating evidence
from allies through the intelligence-sharing machinery.[100]
It is also significant that the US did not refer to the claim
publicly.[101]
Of course, if a single source is reliable, then corroborating
evidence, however desirable, may not be necessary.[102]
To test the credibility of the claim, we asked not only the Foreign
Secretary and his officials but independent, expert witnesses
to explain what it might mean.

64. The language used in the September dossier is
precise: "we judge that Iraq has military plans for
the use of chemical and biological weapons, including against
its own Shia population. Some of these weapons are deployable
within 45 minutes of an order to use them."[103]
In supplementary written evidence, the FCO clarified that this
wording was based on a JIC assessment that "some CBW weapons
could be delivered to units within 45 minutes of an order being
issued."[104]
Mr Straw went into further detail on the provenance, interpretation
and treatment of this claim in private session.

65. Terence Taylor told us that

I would read itand of course I do not know
where the intelligence came from and I do not know about its accuracythat
that would have been based on the Iraqis having ready-filled biological
and chemical weapons. The fact that they would have filled munitions
would not surprise me.[105]

Mr Taylor went on to say that

I think it is a normal practice for countries that
have weapons of this type, special weapons, that there would be
deep storage. When it came to possibly being used in a conflict,
they would be moved to hides and temporary locations, probably
being moved around, taking account of the deployment of the artillery.
So, both would be moving and, so at a certain point through special
instructions, then there would be a convergence and the two would
come together and be useable. I would find that sort of timing
not to be unusual. I would think it probably could be credible.[106]

66. Andrew Gilligan reported the view of his source
that the original source in Iraq of the 45 minutes claim referred
mistakenly not to conventional battlefield weapons systems, but
to missiles:

My source believed that that single source
[in Iraq] had made a mistake, that he had confused the deployment
time for a conventional missile with the deployment time for a
CBW missile. He did not believe that any missiles had been armed
with CBW that would therefore be able to be fireable at 45 minutes'
notice. That original source of the 45 minute claim, he
was the one that spoke about missiles.[107]

However, it is significant when considering the reliability
of Mr Gilligan's source that his evidence was directly contradicted
by the Foreign Secretary and by William Ehrman, the FCO's representative
on the JIC, who told us that the original source of the claim
had referred not to missiles, but to weapons.[108]

67. Dr Inch played down the significance of the claim:

If you have your shells, bombs or missiles filled
with chemical and they are ready for release, it does not seem
to me to make any difference whether it is a chemical weapon or
conventional artillery. It is ready to be fired. I do not
understand why it was put in. I cannot see the significance of
it other than saying that it is a terrible situation. If you are
at war, all weapons have to be deployable fairly quicklyunless
they were suggesting at that stage that the chemicals were stored
way back and that they had to be brought up.[109]

68. Writing in the Times, Bronwen Maddox argued
that "it was simply stupid of Blair" to have included
the claim in the dossier, adding that

In one sense, the allegation is simply a banal military
estimate of the length of time for a launch command to pass down
the chain. It is plausible that the Intelligence services made
such a claim. But it is hard to imagine that any Intelligence
agent would have intended that calculation to be presented as
flamboyantly as it was in the dossier, dominating the short foreword
with its drama to justify the claim of imminent threat.[110]

69. Jack Straw told us

I do not happen to regard the 45 minute statement
having the significance which has been attached to it, neither
does anybody else, indeed nobody round this table, if I say so
with respect. It was scarcely mentioned in any of the very large
number of debates that took place in the House, evidence to the
Foreign Affairs Committee, all of the times I was questioned on
the radio and television, scarcely mentioned at all.[111]

This answer begs the question why the 45 minutes
claim was highlighted by the Prime Minister when he presented
the dossier to the House, and why it was given such prominence
in the dossier itself, being mentioned no fewer than four times,
including in the Prime Minister's foreword and in the executive
summary? We have not seen a satisfactory answer to that question.
We have been told that the entire document, including the executive
summary, was prepared by the Chairman of the JIC, except for the
foreword, which he approved.[112]
We note with disappointment that we were unable to find out why
Mr Scarlett chose to give the 45 minutes claim such prominence,
as we have been prevented from questioning him.

70. We conclude
that the 45 minutes claim did not warrant the prominence given
to it in the dossier, because it was based on intelligence from
a single, uncorroborated source. We recommend that the Government
explain why the claim was given such prominence.

71. We further
recommend that in its response to this Report the Government set
out whether it still considers the September dossier to be accurate
in what it states about the 45 minute claim, in the light of subsequent
events.

73. In her evidence, Dame Pauline Neville Jones told
us in relation to people in the Intelligence Services talking
to the press "There clearly was turbulence inside the machine".[114]

74. Mr Gilligan described the source for his story
as:

one of the senior officials in charge of drawing
up the dossier and I can tell you that he is a source of longstanding,
well-known to me, closely connected with the question of Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction, easily sufficiently senior and credible
to be worth reporting.[115]

We consider below questions about Mr Gilligan's source,
and about the relationship between the security and intelligence
services and the media.[116]

75. As we have noted above, there had been earlier
drafts by the FCO, before the JIC assumed responsibility for the
document.[117]
Mr Gilligan suggests that it was at this point that the dossier
was "sexed up", shortly before publication, by the insertion
of the 45 minutes claim:

only a few weeks before the publication of
the September dossier, Whitehall officials had been describing
it to the press as rather uneventful. then three weeks
after that the dossier appeared and it was more revelatory than
those accounts had it. So something had changed in that three
week period.[118]

Andrew Gilligan also said:

The source's claim was that the dossier had been
transformed in the week before it was published and I asked, "So
how did this transformation happen?", and the answer was
a single word, which was "Campbell". He also
said that Downing Street officials, he did not name anybody else,
had asked repeatedly if there was anything else [in addition to
the 45-minutes claim] that could be included on seeing the original
draft of the dossier which was considered dull.[119]

76. Mr Straw denied this:

There had been previous drafts and this particular
draft, which I think started its life sometime in early September,
went out, it went out for comment and I had a look at it. The
thing I can say perfectly publicly is that I thought it should
make more reference to earlier inspections because having read
this document I thought it should have a wider audience, referring
to UNSCOM's final report of uncompleted disarmament tasks through
late 1998, things like that, suggestions. I think one of my colleagues
suggested that there should be a foreword. That is what happens.
I think the implication of what Mr Gilligan was saying was that
the judgments were changed, but that was not the case.[120]

77. Alastair Campbell himself, Jack Straw and senior
FCO officials who were closely involved in the preparation of
the dossier all denied in evidence to us that the dossier had
been materially changed by Mr Campbell.[121]
In particular, they deny that the 45 minutes claim was inserted
by him or at his request, pointing out that it first appeared
in a JIC assessment discussed at a meeting on 9 September and
then in the first JIC draft of the dossier, dated 10 September,
and that this was the first draft seen by Mr Campbell.[122]
Mr Campbell has told us in terms that "It (the 45 minutes
claim) was not inserted at my request."[123]
If Mr Campbell is not correct in making this statement, then he
and all those who have made similar statements, from the Prime
Minister[124]
through the Foreign Secretary to the Chairman of the JIC are in
contempt of Parliament. We cannot believe that this is so. We
conclude that Alastair Campbell did not play any role in the inclusion
of the 45 minutes claim in the September dossier.

78. Mr Campbell supplied us with a list of changes
to the September dossier which were requested by him, some of
which were made and some not.[125]
The first thing we note from this paper is that Mr Campbell actually
chaired the planning meeting which took place on 9 September.
This was surprising, because we were told by a FCO official, albeit
one who had not attended the drafting meetings, that they had
been chaired by the Chairman of the JIC.[126]
We are concerned that a meeting to discuss a document which Ministers
had asked the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee to
prepare was chaired by the Prime Minister's Special Adviser.

79. We conclude
that it was wrong for Alastair Campbell or any Special Adviser
to have chaired a meeting on an intelligence matter, and we recommend
that this practice cease.

80. Mr Campbell tells us that he underlined the importance
for the credibility of the document that it should be, and be
seen to be, the work of the JIC. He states that he emphasised
"it goes without saying that nothing should be published
that you (the JIC Chairman and the Intelligence Agencies) are
not 100% happy with."

81. The first draft of the document as prepared by
the JIC Chairman reached Mr Campbell the following day. He tells
us he made no comment on it. He received a further draft on 17
September. Mr Campbell has listed the comments which, to the best
of his recollection and that of the Chairman of the JIC, he made
on this draft.

82. Speaking about the generality of his comments,
Mr Campbell told us that "I know the accusation is I sexed
it up, I think this is sexing it down".[127]
On the whole, the effect of his comments was, so far as we can
tell, neutral. Some aspects of the draft he suggested should be
toned down, some he asked to be explained more fully. Accepting
his list as being as full and as accurate as he and the JIC Chairman
can make it, we find that in only one case did Mr Campbell seek
to interfere with the draft in a substantive way, by seeking to
have the issue of aluminium tubes included in the executive summary.
But in this he failed.

83. Mr Campbell received a final draft of the dossier
on 19 September, five days before publication. He has told us
that neither he nor the Chairman of the JIC can recall that he
made any further comments. Mr Straw told us that "Let me
make clear, nobody 'sexed-up' or exaggerated that September dossier,
no-one at all, and that includes Alastair Campbell."[128]

84. We conclude
that on the basis of the evidence available to us Alastair Campbell
did not exert or seek to exert improper influence on the drafting
of the September dossier.

85. Jack Straw told us that there had been no formal
complaints from members of the security and intelligence services
about the content of the dossier.[129]

86. We conclude
that the claims made in the September dossier were in all probability
well founded on the basis of the intelligence then available,
although as we have already stated we have concerns about the
emphasis given to some of them. We further conclude that, in the
absence of reliable evidence that intelligence personnel have
either complained about or sought to distance themselves from
the content of the dossier, allegations of politically inspired
meddling cannot credibly be established.

88. Former Australian intelligence analyst Andrew
Wilkie described intelligence supplied by Iraqi groups "desperate
to encourage intervention in Iraq" as "garbage grade".[131]
Dr Gary Samore, too, was sceptical about the reliability of information
provided by defectors:

I think that any information you get from defectors
should be automatically suspect because defectors have such a
strong interest in making up stories or exaggerating stories,
if not for political reasons then perhaps for reasons of personal
gain. You have to start with the assumption that anything you
get from a defector is probably not accurate. Having said that,
there are occasions when defector information proves invaluable
when there are bona fide people who come out of programmes and
provide extremely important information. That was certainly the
case for Iraq in the early 1990s. There were a couple of defectors
who came out of the nuclear programme and provided very detailed
and accurate information that helped the IAEA to crack the secret
of Iraq's nuclear programme.[132]

89. This is particularly worrying, when set against
the evidence to this Committee of former FCO Minister Ben Bradshaw
last April:

There are limits, as you will understand, to some
of the evidence that we can put in the public domain, not least
because the bulk of the evidence that we have since the weapons
inspectors left, by the very nature of their not being there,
is based on intelligence, is based on defections and is based
on what we know the Iraqi regime has tried to import.[133]

90. We conclude
that without access to the intelligence or to those who handled
it, we cannot know if it was in any respect faulty or misinterpreted.
Although without the Foreign Secretary's degree of knowledge,
we share his confidence in the men and women who serve in the
agencies.

Certainly in the Institute dossier we were a bit
more cautious in saying "probably" and trying to explain
on which basis we had reached that conclusion but I think that
the kind of confidence that you just described in the British
Government dossier was very widely shared in western intelligence
agencies.

94. We note that the paper published by the FCO on
10 November 10 1998 in advance of Operation Desert Fox and which
clearly draws on intelligence material, uses much less certain
language. In paragraph 9 it states "The Iraqi chemical industry
could produce mustard gas almost immediately and nerve agents
within months"; and "Saddam almost certainly retains
some BW production equipment, stocks of agents and weapons."
The WMD dossier states (in paragraph 6 of the Executive Summary)
"As a result of intelligence we judge that Iraq has: continued
to produce chemical and biological agents." The dossier is
much more certain.

95. In her evidence, Dame Pauline Neville Jones told
us "If you put those two statements together one is a much
more active statement than the other " and "those
two statements are justified but can only be justified by a change
in the situation."[139]

96. We also note a difference in wording between
the body of the dossier and the Executive Summary. The Executive
Summary states in paragraph 6 "As a result of the intelligence
we judge that Iraq has continued to produce chemical and
biological agents". The main text states "The JIC concluded
that Iraq had sufficient expertise, equipment and material to
produce biological warfare agents within weeks " and
" the JIC assessed that Iraq retained some chemical
warfare agents, precursors, production equipment and weapons from
before the Gulf War. These stocks would enable Iraq to produce
significant quantities of mustard gas within weeks and nerve agent
within months."[140]
The wording of the Executive Summary is again stronger than the
main text.

97. This occurs again in relation to the 45 minute
claim. The Summary states in paragraph 6 "As a result of
intelligence we judge that Iraq has military plans for
the use of chemical and biological weapons Some of these
weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them."
The main text states "Intelligence indicates that the Iraqi
military are able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within
45 minutes of an order to do so."[141]

98. In significant respects the Executive Summary
is stronger than the main text.[142]

99. On the other hand, the immediate past Chairman
of the JIC, Peter Ricketts, "[did] not find anything in the
language of [the dossier] at all surprising in terms of the judgments
that the JIC reach."[143]
And Dr Tom Inch thought the dossier was if anything less assertive
than he would have wished: "I found that there were too many
weasel-words in the report, as I read it. They could do this or
they might do that and so on, rather than saying that the evidence
was hard."[144]

100. We conclude
that the language used in the September dossier was in places
more assertive than that traditionally used in intelligence documents.
We believe that there is much value in retaining the measured
and even cautious tones which have been the hallmark of intelligence
assessments and we recommend that this approach be retained.

The plain fact is a lot of the intelligence in the
September dossier has turned out in practice to be wrong. I think
it is important that we fasten on how wrong it was, why it was
wrong, and were there other parts of intelligence around which
might have suggested more caution?[147]

Even Jack Straw would have preferred the judgments
and the claims in the dossier to have been better supported:

I was satisfied that the available intelligence justified
the judgments that were made. Would I, in an ideal world, have
preferred more intelligence? For sure, because the only reason
we had to rely on intelligence was because of the highly secretive
and mendacious nature of the Iraqi regime.[148]

The need to ensure that evidence is up-to-date was
emphasised by Dame Pauline Neville Jones:

I would have wanted to go back a bit to see the consistency
of the evidence and whether we really had an audit trail of evidence
that did not have breaks in it so that you did not somehow suddenly
get a period when those previous judgments did not seem to be
supported or where there were gaps in the picture, because that
would have made me worry.[149]

there was substantial, I would say overwhelming,
evidence, a mountain of evidence, that Iraq had research, development
and production facilities and useable weapons and almost certainly
operational biological and chemical weapons. If I were sitting
in a position in early March 2003, that would be a conclusion
and I think I would be irresponsible if I came to some other conclusion.[150]

103. Mr Taylor was of the opinion that the dossier
was substantially accurate:

In its main substance, it seemed to me to be very
accurate. Of course, I was not party to intelligence information
myself, so I was judging it from open sources and from what I
knew and from what I could judge. I suppose it is fair to say
that I am an insider in many ways and, having studied the information
in detail, I think that in main substance, the UK Government's
dossier was correct.[151]

104. When asked whether he thought Iraq had continued
to produce chemical or biological weapons after 1998, Dr Tom Inch,
a Deputy Director of Porton Down in the early 1990s, was more
circumspect: "I do not think that there is any compelling
evidence to say that they did, but again there is no compelling
evidence to say that they did not." Andrew Wilkie, who claimed
to have had access to relevant intelligence, said that

what we have found so far is much closer to
my claim that it was a disjointed and contained WMD programme
and not the sort of big national programme that was sold to us
as the justification for the war. in retrospect it [the
September dossier] is a lousy document because this document led
us to expect that the troops would go into Iraq and encounter
and uncover a huge WMD programme.[152]

105. Dame Pauline Neville Jones also had doubts:

I do not draw the conclusion because they have not
been found they will not be found or do not exist. I am surprised
they have not been found . What I cannot help feeling is
if they had been more operational they would have found something
by now.[153]

106. A member of the Cabinet until the decision to
go to war was taken, Robin Cook told us that "frankly I am
rather surprised we have not discovered some biological toxins
or some chemical agents. Indeed, in my resignation speech I said
they probably are there. The position actually has turned out
to be even less threatening than I anticipated at the time I resigned."[154]

107. Dame Pauline Neville Jones agreed that the absence
of significant weapons finds in Iraq increases the cynicism of
the British public as to the motivation behind the decision to
go to war, saying: "That is why it is very important to establish
what went on."[155]
We conclude that continuing
disquiet and unease about the claims made in the September dossier
are unlikely to be dispelled unless more evidence of Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction programmes comes to light. We
recommend that the Government in its response to this Report set
out whether it still considers the September dossier to be accurate
in respect of material in it not already referred to in our earlier
recommendations above, in the light of subsequent events.